A/N: I hope those who celebrate it had a nice Thanksgiving holiday. Chap 31 review responses are in my forums as normal. After this we have one more chapter on Verghast, and then we proceed to our next big adventure. I've noted before, but from this point forward Taylor is going to remain the primary POV. We'll bounce back to the future, but Taylor is now the primary pov character.
Thanks to all who read and review.
Chapter Thirty-Two: Nunc Autem Venit Super Te Plaga
Tall, spare and lanky, with the pale skin and thick, black hair and beard like the rest of the Tanith, the man moved with near preternatural silence in the midst of Taylor's people. His name was Rilke, and he was the trooper assigned to Taylor's squad of 'scratchers'.
In the background, a never-ending Chaos chant made the air itself seem to ache. The chant started the day before, projected from massive speakers the enemy placed all around the outhabs of the hive. The sound had gone non-stop since then, like an itch in the back of their eyeballs.
The four Tanith ghosts that came to join the various scratch units all had the stamp of a common ancestry and environment. They all came with the camo cloaks, bare arms and foreign tattoos. They didn't talk much, but they moved and looked and sounded like men who had seen hell and walked on by it without blinking an eye.
But even men like Rilke were shaken by the constant chatter that the Zoicans were blasting out toward the curtain wall of Vervunhive through powerful speaker systems.
Gol was leading his own unit in the Spoil, doing their best to pick off Zoican foot soldiers and the occasional tank with the rockets and flamers the Tanith brought with them. Taylor's team had the same hope as they prowled through the shattered outhabs near the Haas West Fort that served as part of the curtain wall around the Vurvunhive main spire.
Rilke, she was pleased to note, had no problem taking her lead. He didn't talk much at all, really. Except when necessary.
"Nearest support is hundred meters back, two lanes over," he whispered as he studied the single Zoican tank and the attached infantry unit that approached. "Five clicks before they have line of sight."
Taylor touched the microbead in her ear the Ghosts brought. "Jesse, five minutes."
"Five minutes," she confirmed.
On the opposite side of the street, with just a minute to spare, Taylor saw her former roommate crawl out from the narrow tunnel that ran under the street with Sehri Muril and a clerk's son named Dorbin right behind her. She held up a fist and then flashed her fingers out.
"Trap is primed, stand by," Taylor whispered. The bead in her ear was so sensitive it picked her whisper up perfectly and transmitted it to her team.
The Zoican tank rolled into view, surrounded by the faceless, crimson soldiers she'd come to hate so very much. She knew there could be women or children in those uniforms, but she also knew whatever made them human was gone–lost to the constant chatter that now filled the air above the shattered outhabs of Vervunhive.
The beast ran on tracks, a metal behemoth twice the height of the soldiers around it. Its primary weapon was a short, heavy cannon with secondary autoguns. The tank commander stood up within the turret, his face hidden behind a gas mask painted with a symbol that made Taylor's eyes ache.
"Take that gakking bastard out first," Taylor muttered. "I don't like his mask."
"Will do," Rilke said in a low, calm tone.
The last moments leading to a sprung trap were the worst. The anticipation grew to almost painful levels as they watched the tank turn its turret. It paused just twenty feet from the sapped road and fired at the battered, heavily damaged Haas West Fort.
All around her, hidden under handmade camo suits of trash and dust, her team waited with their weapons pointed, each one picking out a single soldier with long practice. The Zoican's had increased their patrol sizes to twenty soldiers around each tank as they set their positions around the besieged city, drawing needed infantry away from the front lines as Taylor's and Gol's scratch units continued to take their toll.
Finally, the massive war machine began to move again.
The enemy did not notice the sapped road. Taylor's team had reinforced it enough that nothing under a thousand hundred pounds would even make it move. With the loud, mechanical burr of the moving tank, and their own enclosed helmets and the chatter controlling them, the soldiers could not notice if the sound of the ground under their feet was different.
They noticed when the tank crossed far enough onto the roof of the trap to buckle the supports. The front of the machine dipped forward into the angled pit and jammed its barrel right into the dirt. Rilke fired a single charge from his sniper las; the tank commander's head pulped.
In the confusion, the tank gunner fired; the explosion blew back and the entire tank jumped like a popped corn kernel as flame and smoke burst out from strained seams in the armor.
From either side of the enemy, Taylor's team opened fire with brutal efficiency. In seconds, the twenty enemy soldiers collapsed dead. With Rilke using his powerful sniper scope on overwatch, Taylor signaled her team to do the essential scavenging which helped keep her people supplied.
Suddenly the air above them burned. Not even Taylor could keep the startled cry from her lips as searing, painful actinic light hollowed the atmosphere and melted into Haas West Fort. The agonizing beam blasted away the drum fort's thick armor, obliterating in seconds what weeks of artillery bombardment and tank fire had not broken.
"Gakking hell, what was that?"
Rilke already turned his scope to the south. But he needn't have bothered. The plasma beam was so hot it caused contrails of vapor in its wake that led right to the source. Taylor realized she'd seen it when they arrived to set their trap, but dismissed it as the remnants of a hab unit. But now that she had evidence of what it was, she realized the barely visible golden triangle on the horizon had moved closer since she last looked, albeit only a little.
"Finish the job, then we go," Taylor said over the vox. She turned to her sniper. "Be willing to spare one of those cloaks for a scouting run?"
The man stared at her with a blank face. "You wanna get closer?"
"Don't you?"
Suddenly he grinned. "Why not?"
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
With her team under orders to return to the HQ, Taylor and Rilke ghosted through the remnants of the outhabs in camo cloaks. It didn't take long for her to accept that he was stronger and faster than her, but she forced herself to keep up regardless. Fortunately, they were not engaged in open running, but rather darting through the dangerous maze of the ruined city.
Almost fifteen kilometers out, Taylor realized that the pyramid was just the faintest tip of the beast itself, like the tip of an iceberg.
The machine rose almost five hundred meters above the ruins. There were outhab towers far taller that still stood shakily around it, but none that could move. It was built like a giant pyramid, its sides covered in that same blood-ochre color the Zoican's favored. What made her stomach clench were the symbols in black and white painted over it.
It tore a half-kilometer wide gash through the shattered rubbish of outhabs on massive metal wheels that crushed everything under it. She lost count of all the weapons turrets that covered each of the four sides, but she felt comfortable guessing it could defend itself against armor or air attack. Its top bristled with brass speaker horns that proved this was the source of the chatter that had made sleeping difficult for the past few days.
The picter she used was not military–she'd lifted it from the same VPHC station where she'd armed the first of her girls. She filmed it as it moved, eating its way forward through the rubble with slow, inexorable speed.
"The hive isn't going to survive that thing," she said.
"Not a bit," the ghost beside her muttered.
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
When the Astra Militarum colonel himself met them, Taylor realized the war was approaching its apex. The mobile weapon platform of Ferrozoica had all the earmarks of an end game gambit, and the fact that Rilke's regimental commander arrived in person to take it down proved that at least some of Vervunhive's leadership recognized the threat.
That he came with only thirty men, though, made her wonder if he was the only one who did.
Taylor's first impression of Commissar-Colonel Gaunt was of a hard, cold man who had accepted violence as a way of life. He wore a formal commissar cap, black with gold braids purposefully dulled with ash to avoid reflecting light. Most of his uniform, like those of his men, was black and leather. He also carried an exquisitely made power sword and a bolter gun that Taylor doubted she could fire without breaking her wrist.
He moved with the absolute air of command, one that could only be gained through intense training, conditioning and experience. More importantly, though, Taylor could see how his men followed him. They looked at him with the same trust her own teams had for her or Gol.
They met just two streets away from lines of battle, where the city's defenders exchanged fearsome fire with the Zoican front lines. But here, just a few streets away, the defending soldiers were able to make their way out into the outhabs to meet them.
As the colonel arrived and looked over the joint unit she and Kol put together, Taylor snapped a salute. "Brevet-Lieutenant Washton, Vervun Primary. This is Brevet-Lieutenant Kolea. Rilke tells us you have a plan for the Spike?"
Ibram Gaunt paused, clearly surprised by her gesture and manner. He recovered quickly, and returned the salute. Then, to her utter surprise, he stepped forward and offered his gloved hand, first to Taylor, then to Gol. "Brevet-Lieutenants. My men have told me a great deal about what you've accomplished. The honor is mine."
Taylor accepted the strong, firm grip. Kol did the same. "Thank you, sir," Taylor said. She motioned to their units. "These are our best. How can we help?"
"Infiltration. I'll need you to lead us through the outhabs to get into position to board and disable the Spike. We anticipate heavy resistance. I won't lie, ladies and gentlemen, we're not all coming back. But I believe I have a means of disabling the weapon. It might very well mean an end to the war."
One of the Ghost officers, a major, said, "Movement, two hundred meters west."
Taylor signaled her squad, as did Gol his, and the scratchers melted into the surrounding wreckage. The off world soldiers did the same, just as if not faster. Their alarm proved unfounded as ten more off-world soldiers arrived.
Unlike Gaunt's people, these soldiers came in blue and gray carapace armor, with black hellgun repeating lasrifles in their hands. Each one stood taller than Taylor, with most standing taller than Gaunt himself, and each bore an indigo aquila about the collars of their uniforms.
"Not going in without the Bluebloods, I hope, colonel-commissar," the leader of the newcomers called in an off-world accent that sounded aristocratic.
"I wouldn't dream of it, Colonel Gilbear," Gaunt said. He welcomed the heavily armed and armored fire team as the rest of the teams emerged back from their hiding places.
"Wish we had gear like that," Gol noted under his breath.
"If we did, there wouldn't be anyone left for the Primary or off-worlders to fight," Taylor said.
The major who warned of the newcomers didn't look happy with their arrival. Taylor, though, knew they were going to need the firepower once they reached the enemy superweapon.
~~Revelation~~
~~Revelation~~
"I like him. Can you imagine Gnide, or Croe or any of the other Vervun primary officers getting in the field like this?"
Gol spoke under his breath as he and Taylor quietly led the Ghosts through the wastelands. Initially Gaunt showed hesitancy when they first went into the dangerous-looking, hastily dug tunnels, but they quickly proved their worth when the acidic, chemically laden rain began falling outside.
The Ghosts fit just fine in the tunnels; the huge, heavily armored Volpone men struggled.
Within the safety of the tunnels that Taylor and Kol both used for their ambushes, they walked right by or under hundreds of Zoican units that were moving in the opposite direction toward the curtain wall. Taylor repressed the urge to ambush them.
"Getting smaller," Kol noted in a low voice as they watched two infantry squads walk by on either side of another tank.
Now that he mentioned it, the soldiers did look shorter and thinner than those they'd been fighting. "Probably just kids," Taylor noted.
Gol snorted as he looked pointedly at her. "Kids can kill too, right lieutenant?"
She knew him; she knew he had two kids and a wife that he loved more than anything, but lost. Yes, he was talking about her, but she heard the grief in his voice for his own as well.
"You're not wrong."
Eventually, they reached the last tunnel passage that emerged just under a desecrated chapel for the workers of a haulage plant. They gathered behind the structure, which the Zoican's had desecrated with feces, crude paintings, and the crucifixion of a dozen flayed workers.
Beyond the broken fence were the rolling fields. As the rest of the Ghosts and Volpone men made their way through the tunnels, Taylor could see the glimmer of shell cases in the fields from the enemy heavy artillery that once fired on them.
MkVenner started forward. Taylor looked over at the closest of her people; Nessa saw her look and grabbed at the soldier. He was one of the few Ghosts who could sign, and he watched as she told him how the Zoicans had begun booby-trapping their former locations to stop the Scratcher's predations.
Rather than argue, the man simply gave her a nod and went to speak to his colonel. Moments later another Ghost moved out into the field with a mine-sweeper in hand. He played out a cord behind him as he zigzagged through what appeared to be a heavily mined area.
So they went, hours spent crawling through broken outhabs, flattened manufactoria, flooded culverts and the beaten trails of Zoican war machines. Rotting bodies lay where they fell, untended by the attacking chaos forces. All the while, the golden tip of the Spike grew closer and closer to Vervunhive.
On several occasions, they hid while Zoican troops or supply trains moved toward the now distant city walls.
Still the Spike grew larger, and larger. Five kilometers dropped to one–though the giant war machine was itself moving, it did so at half the rate of a man walking. The force of seventy or so Ghosts, Volpone and Scratchers made up the difference quickly despite the heavy rain.
They found shelter in rubble as the acidic rain poured around them, pulling the chemicals of combat from the air. Taylor watched as the Colonel spoke with his men, pointing and whispering a plan. One of the snipers pointed at a pair of worker hab towers that stood near the likely path of the massive machine.
They came back with a plan.
"We're going to infiltrate from surrounding towers," Gaunt explained quickly and clearly. "Two units. Half under me, half under Gilbear and the Volpones. Priority is getting on the Spike."
Taylor looked for Rilke. "The sides are sheer and the angle's steep. Sure, there are some steps, but if you land on the slope you're in trouble. Do we have anything to keep us from just sliding off the sides?"
"She's right, Colonel," Rilke chimed in. "Got a good look up close before we sent the data to you.
Beside Taylor, Kolea shook his head. "I saw the picts. It's just thin sheet metal, at least on the outer surface. Ferrozoica didn't have the mining resources we did, they couldn't find enough metal to make that too thick. I'd be willing to bet a man could get a knife through it."
"There's your answer," Gaunt said with a firm nod. "Scratchers, pair off with a Ghost or a Blueblood if you don't have a good knife of your own. We can't afford to lose anyone to accidents. Move out!"
They moved with purpose now, rushing to get ahead of the giant shield. Taylor knew they only had to get high enough to get over the massive armored tracks and what was likely impressive anti-personnel weapons to keep infantry at bay.
They reached their selected hab just minutes ahead of the giant war machine. As they walked through the shattered doors and reached the stairwell of the powerless tower, the machine fired.
Even within the tower, Taylor squatted down and covered her ears. Around them, the walls and the stairs shook violently, and somehow even through the walls Taylor could see a flash of light, almost like an x-ray. She heard the tinkle of shattering glass as the air pressurized before the shock of heat from the plasma burst.
Taylor blinked back ghostly afterimages and saw Gaunt ahead wiping a touch of blood from his lip. He must have bit himself from the shock of the weapon.
They continued up, but only five levels. Gol was with Gilbear in the next tower down, hoping to increase their odds by spreading their infiltration point. They broke into abandoned flats just as the war machine reached them.
Taylor watched numbly as the leading edge of the giant machine struck the walls of the hab tower and just tore away the structure. As she watched, though, she noticed that the individual metal sheets set within their stronger lattice frames bowed with the movement. She nodded to herself, relieved that Kol was right.
At the end of the flat, just on the edge of where the war machine's edge crumbled the hab into dust and rubble, Gaunt signaled.
To the man's credit, he led the way personally, jumping with his long Tanith knife in hand. They all jumped after in twos and threes, barely clearing the tectonic clash of machine and hab tower. The slope was steep enough, though, that even with the lower slope crunching the tower, from the fifth floor there was still a drop.
A very long drop.
Taylor struck feet and blade first, and grunted as the wind left her lungs and her knees buckled. Her feet immediately lost purchase and she almost lost her knife, but managed to hang on by her finger tips. Others also struggled, but having jumped with their knives in hand, they were able to mostly arrest their slides. Gol was right, but just barely. She got her knife in because of her jump. Just under the cut, she saw another layer of thicker armor below.
Once secured, they began to slowly climb up the slope to the nearest of the steps–terraces that made the giant pyramid look almost like a ziggurat.
She made it just in time to see the machine strike the second hab tower much more directly than theirs. "Gol!"
The second unit had gone higher, perhaps realizing the danger. The bluebloods and Gol's team of scratchers all jumped from the seventh floor of the second hab, and landed on the slope above their step, rather than below like Gaunt's people.
They struggled the same as Gaunt's team, but with knives ready only one man fell–one of the Volpone slipped and began to slide uncontrollably. One of the massive Ghosts, a huge muscular man who could have given Gol a run for his money, jumped up from the step and grabbed the heavily armored soldier by the strap of his hellgun.
Even with all his strength, the weight of the Blue Blood almost sent the Ghost over the edge too, until his fellows helped him.
"Good catch, Bragg!"
Taylor didn't know who spoke, but the man named Bragg shrugged as he pulled the saved Blueblood up. "I don't always miss."
The rest of the second group made their way down to the step to regroup. From where she stood, Taylor could see the main hive in the distance. The shot that had shocked them inside the hab must have struck the city void shield, because it was shimmering in a way that made her think it was about to go down.
"There's heavier armor under the light sheet metal," Gol told them after a little testing. "It's not Verghastite material, must be offworld. How're we getting in?"
"Domor," Gaunt called.
It was the minesweeper from before. The soldier took his equipment and began looking for a way in. Gilbear sent two of his men scouting as well. While that was happening, Taylor quickly went through her team to make sure there weren't any injuries from the jump. She made her way to Gaunt and Gilbear when Domor and the two Volpone soldiers returned.
"The main weapon ports along the forward face," the man told Gaunt, with the rest of them listening. "They're open, ready for firing. It's that or nothing."
"And if they fire while we're entering?" One of the Ghosts asked.
The Blueblood officer shrugged with practiced nonchalance. "We won't feel a thing. You want to stay out here for the rest of the war?"
Orders were spread and they started toward the front face when the massive machine fired again.
Taylor covered her whole head in her arms and ducked down. The flight flash felt like fire against her skin, and the air pressure made her ears and her whole head hurt, as if Gol and just slapped her.
She wondered where she would reappear, if the weapon fired with her in its path.
Gaunt led the way; she and her people followed.